For Medicine, Memoriam

R.C. Basner's collection of elegiac poems remembers with the fidelity of art. This is mature work, marked by breath-taking use of the forms of poetry, its traditions, its technē as well as its ethos. Inscribed to poets, physicians, musicians, and artists, his poems summon haunted presences and absences to come. Some of those mourned were killed in the Holocaust, igniting rage along with grief. Although the poet is himself a physician, these are not poems "about" medicine but rather poems that emerge from the doctor's inevitable grief regarding the nearness to death and the ultimate futility of impulses to heal. We welcome this powerful poetic voice, speaking at once the tongues of body, soul, and spirit.